football
Steve O'Rourke
As predictable as night following day, you can almost sense the transitional change from summer to autumn by the onset of a new football season accompanied by the latest FIFA instalment. Football needs context for it to grab the armchair midfield general. A title challenge, relegation battle or lengthy cup run are the norm, but last year FIFA 17 introduced The Journey, a soap-opera style narrative that involved guiding the young talent of Alex Hunter from football academy obscurity to Premiership star striker.In FIFA 18, The Journey is back with a bigger scope than before. Hunter is tempted Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
John Donnelly’s play The Pass scored a slate of five-star reviews when it ran at the Royal Court early last year – theartsdesk called it “scorching” – and plaudits for Russell Tovey’s central performance were practically stellar (“a star performance from onetime History Boys student that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested,” we raved). For those who missed that sell-out, small-stage, seven-week run, Ben A Williams’ film adaptation delivers all the impact of that experience, in an independent British production that manages the transfer from stage to screen more than Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First World War, when 41 men associated with the east London team – players, backroom staff and supporters – joined up en masse to fight the Kaiser. Three never returned and several others were seriously injured.It's a familiar story of young men – whether united by town or occupation – who joined “pals regiments” (the Orient players joined the Footballers' Battalion) where they thought they would be having a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Football seeps into every cranny of British culture, but it's hard to name a great comedy or drama about the game of two halves. The history of fictionalised football is mainly a catalogue of failure. The liveliest portraits of the game have come at it from the female perspective – The Manageress, or Footballers’ Wives, or Bend It Like Beckham – or at an oblique angle such as Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, or from another source altogether in the case of David Peace’s novel The Damned United. Mostly they’re just crap.In this underpopulated sub-genre, Rovers jogs onto a boggy pitch with reduced Read more ...
james.woodall
With eyes trained on sporty Rio de Janeiro once more for next year’s Olympic Games, cultural portals on to the city are bound to be offered in all sorts of places around the world. One such is Rio+Film, a new film festival at the Barbican Centre focusing exclusively on the great Brazilian city by the sea. Rio+Film is likely to have further editions elsewhere.Curator Adriana Rouanet says the “+” in the festival’s name underlines that the chosen films burrow beneath the usual image of beach, football and carnival. In the Saturday-night hot spot was Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s 2002 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a huge hit, a small-budget British film that in 2002 unexpectedly found an international audience way beyond its setting in suburban west London, and made stars of its two young leads, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra. Now the director (with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges) has written a stage musical version, with music by Howard Goodall and lyrics by Charles Hart.The story has undergone some tweaks to bring it to the stage, but the setting – Southall in 2001 – remains the same. Jess Bhamra (Natalie Dew), an 18-year-old girl of Punjabi Sikh Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Football is a subject close to Patrick Marber's heart. He's a lifelong Arsenal fan and during his sojourn away from London (and writing, as he was suffering from writer's block for much of it) in Sussex, he became involved with his local non-league team, Lewes, helping to establish it as a community-owned club in 2010.His beloved sport has inspired Marber's return both to the National and to playwriting (his last stage work was 2006's Don Juan in Soho and his most recent project was script-doctoring the film version Fifty Shades of Grey, which was rejected by the book's author EL James).Non- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The devil gets the best lines, as usual. That may depend, of course, on whether we’re prepared to qualify David Cameron in that role, but in William Gaminara's rapid-firing farce The Three Lions, the PM (played with real brio by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) certainly gets to show off his nefarious side, and then goes on to riff demonically as everything descends, gloriously, into chaos.Gaminara tells his own acerbic version of what happened when Cameron, supported by David Beckham and Prince William, went to Switzerland in December 2010 to try and clinch Britain’s 2018 World Cup bid with FIFA. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marvellous reviews itself in its title. The story of Neil Baldwin starring Toby Jones was – and is, because you should catch it while you can on iPlayer – simply marvellous. As a dramatic character Neil Baldwin could be mistaken for unremarkable. He has no hidden depths. Positioned somewhere along the autistic spectrum, he is apparently away with the fairytales, but his grandiose fantasies mostly happened to be true. Though droll without always intending to be, he has an enviable gift for friendship. And his story has something to teach us about civility and good cheer and holding on to Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For most of us, reaching the age of 50 prompts a mature recognition of faded aspirations, balanced by some degree of respect, influence, and tender familial consolation. Most observers would say Match of the Day fits that pattern quite closely. Its more youthful, dynamic days are remembered with great respect, though it’s politely acknowledged to be wearier and wrinklier than before, its fiftieth birthday is an occasion for dignity and circumspection.So it was a surprise to find this celebration of Match of the Day’s 50 years combining the giddy nausea of a toddlers’ bouncy castle party with Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gary Lineker has been honing his marketing schtick for several decades now, selling us a spud-based product that promises to make us feel great, only to fill us with self-loathing as soon as it’s finished. Yes, the England football team, seemingly made of potato, slickly packaged, but ultimately unsatisfying and undoubtedly bad for your health. (The crisps, I hear, are much healthier than they used to be.)Of course we lost. We lost to Italy in the European Championships in 2012, and haven’t beaten the Azzurri in the World Cup since 1977. They’ve won it four times, most recently in 2006, when Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As an appetiser to the tournament about to swamp your television, the BBC paired up one global football brand with another: Becks, meet Brazil; Brazil, meet Becks. Appropriately the encounter lasted 90 minutes, and featured long stretches in which the two tentative participants probed and prodded at each other, interleaved by occasional brief flare-ups of drama.The BBC told the story of Brazil only recently through the portal of Michael Palin. Where Palin took an avuncular stroll through the country's history, geography and culture, Beckham’s researches erred towards the slightly more skin- Read more ...